I don't think we'll ever learn.

U.S. Is Likely to Continue Aid to Pakistan: "The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president.

In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President Bush has called one of his most critical allies, the officials argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas."

I was telling my sister this morning that it just feels like deja vu all over again. We prop up a regime, despite its human rights abuses, because it is strategically beneficial to our interests, all the while stoking the fires of anti-American feelings in hundreds of little Osama bin Ladens all over the Middle East.